Repressed. "Second pressing of vinyl re-issue. First official vinyl re-issue in collaboration with original band members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward. 24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes. 80 gram wax housed in an expanded gatefold tip-on jacket. Includes booklet with track notes and archival photos. With their debut album and follow-up maxi single Health and Efficiency, This Heat sowed the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock, placing the trio -- Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams -- at the forefront of experimental music. However, 1981s Deceit is the one that truly deserves its reputation as a classic of the post-punk era, tying up the myriad threads of their work so far and adding accessibility and melody to the still furiously forward-thinking sound. Recorded in a variety of studios including the bands own Cold Storage, the 11 tracks put a sense of social anxiety and global paranoia to the fore. Some lyrics were “harvested” from TV commercials ("Sleep"), others described the curtain-twitching of surveillance society ("Triumph"), and some were screamed with raw, ragged abandon, like on "Makeshift Swahili". "Makeshift was a big learning situation for me," says Hayward. "I learned to let go with my voice, to release the energy that each song required, no matter where that might lead. The song, about the collapse of language, was central to the Deceit idea." Musical innovations abound too -- drum tracks were recycled from other recordings, albeit in manipulated and mutated form, and "Independence" reverses the melody of earlier track "Fall Of Saigon". Its an album whose themes and sounds unfurl before the listener, the mood of edgy, pre-apocalyptic tension growing throughout. Says Hayward: "I still think of this record as a dream within a dream." This Heat split a year after the release, with Bullen and Hayward completing the final tour without Williams. Hayward went on to form Camberwell Now and Bullen recorded as Lifetones. A tentative 2001 reunion came, tragically, too late -- Williams died of cancer within a month of them meeting to rehearse." - Modern Classics.

"First official vinyl re-issue in collaboration with original band members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward. 24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes. 180 gram wax housed in an expanded gatefold tip-on jacket. Includes booklet with track notes and archival photos. With their self-titled debut, This Heat sowed the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock. The album took the trio -- Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams -- two years to create, and placed them at the forefront of experimental music. The follow-up, the 20-minute Health and Efficiency, proved to be a less labored -- and more conventional -- record to make. Bridging the gap between the debut and their masterpiece, Deceit, the 1980 release found the band settling into a groove at their studio, Cold Storage. The eight-minute title track, remembers Charles Hayward, "was improvised pretty much fully-formed," and included the sound of the neighboring schools playground and the band rolling bottles around in the gallery space next to their studio. Thats where they found the maxi-singles sleeve too -- Pete Cobbs blue and white image was on display in the same gallery. As Charles Hayward notes: "Everything seemed to fall into place." On the B-side, the drone for "Graphic/Varispeed" came from the song "24 Track Loop" on the first album, albeit manipulated, slowed down and sped up. "In the process, we realized that we liked the morphing of the sound from one state to another as the vari-speed combed the sound across the equalization, like a microscope. So we recorded the process itself, which is what you hear here," says Hayward. The intention was for the single to be able to be played at 33, 45 or 78 RPM -- which youre welcome to do with this reissue, too." - Modern Classics.

Repressed. "Second pressing of vinyl re-issue.First official vinyl re-issue in collaboration with original band members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward. 24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes. 180 gram wax housed in an expanded gatefold tip-on jacket. Includes booklet with track notes and archival photos. Isnt it so often the case that the most innovative works of art -- the ones that break the ground where others follow -- are the ones that seem to reach only the ears of those who take those ideas and run with them? So it is with This Heat and their eponymous debut album frequently referred to as “blue and yellow” for its ultra-minimal jacket. Within its 48 minute run time, the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock can be found. Formed in Brixton, a multicultural, and -- at the time -- down-at-heel part of south London, This Heat were born into a music scene in rapid flux, first thanks to the punk explosion and then via new wave and its myriad offshoots into pop, rock and art-rock. But while many sought to apply punk attitude to chart-friendly sounds, This Heat were concocting some of the most experimental ideas ever committed to tape, taking influence from musique concrète, krautrock, the burgeoning industrial scene and even the dub reggae blasting out in their home borough. Their debut album had -- for the time and for the DIY scene -- an unusually long gestation, recorded in sessions between February 1976 and September 1978 in a variety of studios including their own Cold Storage, a converted cold storage room in the Acme Studios complex. Innovating throughout, they combined loops and tape manipulation with live performance and haunting vocals to a complex, dissonant whole. The band recorded everything they ever did -- including gigs -- and tracks such as “Water” were entirely improvised in the studio. Given the difficult, abrasive, and involved nature of their sound, This Heat never found anything approaching mainstream success, but patronage by the influential Radio 1 DJ John Peel meant they reached a national audience -- whether that audience was ready for them or not. Celebrating This Heats 40th anniversary in 2016, Modern Classics Recordings will re-issue the bands catalog -- 1979sThis Heat, 1980s Health and Efficiency, and 1981s Deceit -- with full co-operation of surviving members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward. Four decades on, the tireless efforts of This Heats process can once again be a revelation for new audiences." - Modern Classics.

"Between Blue & Yellow and Deceit came the 3" EP, Health and Efficiency. It bridges a gap between the mostly improvisational former, and the highly composed latter, showing great diversity in the bands sound in general, as well as nicely documenting their two extreme directions. The title track is This Heats single most high-energy piece ever, and is a tour de force of singing, ensemble playing and sound texture. It is propelled along by Charles Bullens signature guitar strumming & ratcheting harsh picking, and includes an extended coda section, where the solos are tape loops and field recordings of such unlikely instruments as dishes clanking around in the sink, a childrens playground, metal clangings, hoots & howls, as well as tons of tonalities whose impetuses can only be guessed at now. It evokes the darkest aspects of This Heats musical beauty, and the drumming throughout is explosive. Graphic/Varispeed is a completely different kettle of fish; a trance-like VSO experiment meant (on vinyl) to be listened to at 33 1/3 and 16 rpm, as well as the original 45 rpm (the version on this disk): A single tape loop from a section of the first album is processed to the point of unfamiliarity, stripping it of almost all motion, save for the changing of pitches, which become increasingly more radical as the piece unfolds. It is one of the bands most experimentally sound moments, and serves as the direct antithesis to the title track." -This Is.

"Until now, the only live This Heat has been a long-deleted cassette version of a concert from Krefeld, Germany, from 1980. At last, we are able to officially release private recordings from the bands live repertoire, circa 1980-1981, taken from concerts in Tilburg, Nijmegan, Arhus, Appledoorn, Vienna and Rheims. The trio rip through some highly-charged versions of classic pieces from both Blue & Yellow and Deceit, as well as an improvisation (Aerial Photography, the tone of which could well be the backing track for their classic, Triumph) and one previously unheard song (The Rough With The Smooth, circa Deceit). This disk is a must for all This Heat fans: it gives us alternate versions of their classics, whilst documenting the immense energy and tonal quality of their live shows from that period." -This Is.

Artist: THIS HEAT
Title: Out Of Cold Storage
Format: 6 CD Box Set
Label: This Is
Country: USA
Price: $92.00

"The complete official lifetime releases of This Heat: This Heat, Deceit, Health and Efficiency, Made Available and Repeat, re-mastered and re-packaged, with a substantial (48pp) book of interviews, recollections, information, documents and photographs in a sturdy box, PLUS a new CD of concert recordings." - This Is.

"Repeat is This Heats fourth album proper, posthumously released in 1993. It harbors the most extreme musical side of This Heats experimental tendencies on disk, and is assuredly the bands most radical offering. The title track is an oxymoron: An extended/edited version of the piece 24 Track Loop, which had been previously issued on the Recommended Records double-disk sampler in 1981, heard here sans the harmonizer effect. The original tracks were produced by David Cunningham (Flying Lizards) and Anthony Moore (Slapp Happy-Henry Cow). Metal follows, and is essentially the late Gareth Williams leading the others in the band on a acoustic foray: ...recording metal sculptures, mostly -- rejects from someones studio -- some corrugated asbestos, and a lot of scrap metal, as Charles Bullen recollects many years later. The result can only be likened to the works of master electro-acousticians Denis Dufour and Francoise Bayle; an approach as far removed from rock music as can be, elucidating the cutting-edge nature of This Heat when not confined to the premises of compositional thought. Graphic/Varispeed is an alternate, 33 1/3 rpm version of the piece heard on Health & Efficiency. Originally released on 12" vinyl, the speed setting and track timing were not specified, leaving the listener in a quandary as to its intent, but ultimately (and altruistically) leaving the public to decide the fate of the piece. HOWEVER, by issuing both versions on two separate albums, the enigma cleverly lives on." -This Is.

"This Heat, the band, emerged in early 1976 on the leading edge of what became the New Wave, but they were always apart, more scary and more subtle. Known as the most left-field, and at the same time most hard-edged, band in all of England, their concerts attracted experimental, punk and new wave audiences alike. Just a handful of performances made them the band everyone had to see, and every journalist had to interview. And the more we knew, the more enigmatic they became. This Heat was a passion. The band worked day-in, day-out for years in their own, now legendary, studio in Brixton (Cold Storage - sited in an old industrial meat refrigerator), or they were away somewhere touring abroad. In this hothouse environment, their material evolved and grew, and became increasingly intense; on the one hand more cuttingly simple, on the other more layered and more dense. When their first LP - itself several years in the making - finally appeared on David Cunninghams Piano label in 1979, with its distinctive blue and yellow sleeve, it acquired immediate iconic status. And over time it has also proved itself prescient; there are musical innovations here that anticipate genres that would take another 15 years to reappear. This Heat, the record was a landmark release. It tore up the book and laid new rules for band composition and performance. The music was without precedent; the musicians uncompromising; the recordings hammeringly intense and the sound deep, radical, and rich. This was music stripped back to the bone but never simplified. And it hasnt aged. The later CD version of the LP has now been out of print for some fourteen years (and is currently fetching $300-$350 second-hand), so this edition, the first on the new This Is label, re-mastered and repackaged by the group, will be doubly welcome. It is the first of a series of historical This Heat re-editions and unpublished works by the band to be released on this dedicated label." - This Is.